Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Love is a serious mental disease.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

The only big things I’ve purchased are my dad’s heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga license plate on our old car and it was making me crazy because he was getting followed everywhere, so I bought him a new car.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

I don’t want enemies. I want friends, and I want them in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and loving whoever they want to.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Women – always in trouble with them, but can’t live without them.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

God is so big. It’s a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we’re small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: ‚This is my country.‘

The truth is lived, not taught.

The art is long, life is short.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Love is the most powerful thing in the world, and you know, what love brings is joy.

My life is my argument.

My mom and I have always been there for each other. We had some tough times, but she was always there for me.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

I have rules for a lot of areas of my life. Love is not going to be one of them.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

That government is best which governs least.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.